When Martha Sipple-Stevens found herself back in the dating pool a couple of years after her husband passed away, she was initially frightened about re-entering the singles scene as a fifty-something widow.

In a world of fast-paced developments in technology, it’s important to stay informed of new advances– especially when it comes to healthcare. Many technologies used in therapy can promote recovery and benefit a wide range of patients.

We’ve seen so many of them on store shelves for years. Packages and kits that make a meal or dessert, and all you do is add water or just a few ingredients. I’ve passed them up thousands of times, but this shopping trip was different.

I bet you remember the following line: “Not just a headache...but an Excedrin headache.” Remember that ad campaign? According to the commercial, Excedrin was reserved for the worst type of headache in the world. Grantor trusts—sometimes called living trusts—are popular documents that many retirees set up to avoid Excedrin headaches for their heirs.

I was 16 when we first got cable in 1978. By the time it reached Southern Michigan, the technology had achieved an almost-mythical status: cable was this mystical electronic IV, of sorts, that hooked into your television’s bloodstream and made it an all-seeing, trash-talking R-rated genius. Kind of like the drug in “Flowers for Algernon.” (I never actually read “Flowers for Algernon,” but I did watch the movie version of it. On cable.)

They are large twin rooms with two rows of throne-like chairs with built-in footrests. The chairs in one room are green, muted red ones in the other, with a glassed-in nurses’ station between the two open spaces.

I’m working out with weights in the gym—pressing 17.5 pounders above my head and then squatting and bringing them down to my ankles. After counting 16 reps, I stand the weights upright in front of me and look at myself in the mirror.

Jessie Clark used to go bowling once a week with her husband Bill. They bowled in a league arranged by AT&T, where Bill worked in Reno, Nev. So when Bill retired from the company in the early ‘80s, the couple also hung up their bowling shoes. Jessie took up painting and figured that her bowling days were behind her.

With 296 days of sunshine in Phoenix (and Tucson slightly behind with 284 days, according to Current Results), here in sunny Arizona we don’t worry much about rainy days. However, if you read “70 percent chance of showers tomorrow,” what would you do? Postpone your golf game? Cancel your picnic? Grab an umbrella?

Administrators at a California high school sent five students home for refusing to remove their American flag T-shirts on Cinco de Mayo, a Mexican holiday, because it would be “insensitive” to be displaying Old Glory on another nation’s day of celebration.

OK, I’m going to sound old now.
I’ve been trying to avoid this. There’s a subtle self-consciousness that settles over you once you reach the far side of 40: “Don’t say anything that betrays your age,” it tells you, “Don’t gripe about progress. Don’t lament the current era or compare it with a previous one. Don’t complain about new-fangled inventions and don’t EVER use the word ‘newfangled.’”